Whewell graduated from Cambridge in 1816, and worked as a tutor there from 1823 to 1838. In 1828, he was also appointed professor of mineralogy. In 1844, he became master of Trinity College, Cambridge, a post he held until 1866. Whewell published and edited many works in the natural and mathematical sciences, philosophy, theology, and the history of science He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1820, as well as the Geological Society for which he served as president in 1837-8.

Rare. By the time Whewell published this essay, the mineralogical classifications proposed by Mohs and Breithaupt in which physical or external mineralogical characters determined the classes of the minerals. Berzelius, Gmelin, Beudant, and Leonhard championed arrangements according to their chemical relations. Whewell published here that if these two divergent methods are to be reconciled, it must be done through a natural history method similar to Mohs.